A blog about a blog.

"When I was a child, I was deeply petrified of bees.  To be honest, I still get a little uneasy whenever those flying monsters buzz around my head.  In the last couple of years, however, I have come to appreciate bees more than ever before.  As a matter of fact, I am convinced that many of the problems that occur among evangelical Christians today could be solved by bees.  Let me explain…"

The $15 Billion Secret Of The Honey Bee & The Disappearance Of Evangelicals
Jamal Jivanjee

"Pure beeswax is secreted in the form of tiny fish scale-like discs by four pair of glands separating the abdomen segments in 12-18 day old worker (female) honey bees. The bee rakes the wax disc off with combs on one hind leg and passes it to the front two legs (yes, the bee is now standing on three of its six legs) which move it  to the strong jaws. The jaws chew it into malleable wax which the bees use to build their amazingly light and strong honeycomb -- cells where the young are reared and where pollen and honey are stored. Wax production is incredibly energy-taxing --  bees must consume eight ounces of honey for each ounce of wax they make.

"Modern day engineers and architects marvel at the perfection of the hexagon shaped wax cells with the 110 and 70 degree angles. This design is the strongest, most efficient for maximum storage, and the perfect angles for cradling the young larvae."

The Story of Beeswax
Honey Bees and Heather Farm


"A honeycomb constructed from beeswax is nothing short of a triumph of engineering. It consists of hexagon shaped cylinders (six-sided) that fit naturally side-by-side. It has been proven by mathematicians that making the cells into hexagons is the most efficient shape. The smallest possible amount of wax is used to contain the highest volume of honey. It has also been shown to be one of the strongest possible shapes while using the least amount of material. "

How Bees Make Wax
Beeswax Company, LLC


"The glandular secretions of honeybees can do more than divide the cells of a hive; beeswax-based paint-coated walls in Ancient Greece and copies of the Magna Carta were delivered in 1215 bearing a beeswax seal. These days, it's mostly an ingredient in candles and cosmetics, but you can visit a craft store or a farmers' market, pick up a cake of it, and put it to work around the house as well."

10 Uses for Beeswax
By: Harry Sawyers, This Old House magazine

"Recent losses of honey bee colonies have led to increased interest in the microbial communities that are associated with these important pollinators. A critical function that bacteria perform for their honey bee hosts, but one that is poorly understood, is the transformation of worker-collected pollen into bee bread, a nutritious food product that can be stored for long periods in colonies. We used 16S rRNA pyrosequencing to comprehensively characterize in genetically diverse and genetically uniform colonies the active bacterial communities that are found on honey bees, in their digestive tracts, and in bee bread. This method provided insights that have not been revealed by past studies into the content and benefits of honey bee-associated microbial communities. Colony microbiotas differed substantially between sampling environments and were dominated by several anaerobic bacterial genera never before associated with honey bees, but renowned for their use by humans to ferment food. Colonies with genetically diverse populations of workers, a result of the highly promiscuous mating behavior of queens, benefited from greater microbial diversity, reduced pathogen loads, and increased abundance of putatively helpful bacteria, particularly species from the potentially probiotic genus Bifidobacterium. Across all colonies, Bifidobacterium activity was negatively correlated with the activity of genera that include pathogenic microbes; this relationship suggests a possible target for understanding whether microbes provide protective benefits to honey bees. Within-colony diversity shapes microbiotas associated with honey bees in ways that may have important repercussions for colony function and health. Our findings illuminate the importance of honey bee-bacteria symbioses and examine their intersection with nutrition, pathogen load, and genetic diversity, factors that are considered key to understanding honey bee decline."

Characterization of the Active Microbiotas Associated with Honey Bees Reveals Healthier and Broader Communities when Colonies are Genetically Diverse
Heather R. Mattila, Daniela Rios, Victoria E. Walker-Sperling, Guus Roeselers, Irene L. G. Newton

This is beyond ridiculous.

"I am convinced that the backyard hobby beekeeper will be the salvation of the honey bee because large commercial beekeepers must place their hives where they face the intense use of pesticides and GMOs on large mono-culture farms. Certain commercial beekeeping practices necessary for pollination are extremely stressful for the bees. Therefore, the hobbyist beekeeper must be protected.

"That leads to what I find to be most troubling: The government control over a successful beekeeping hobbyist.

"Current law requires each of my beekeeping youth to have a state Beekeeper's License ($10 for up to 10 hives). If he or she is to sell any of his honey, he or she must also train for, and possess, a Food Handler Permit ($21 here in Iron County) and a state Cottage Food Producer License ($30). Add to that business licenses and business registration with various local and state government entities and a young 4-H beekeeper faces substantial bureaucratic obstacles to a small hobby that will likely result in a small amount of sales. The heavy level of licensing and regulation required of even a non-4-H hobbyist beekeeper who sells part of his harvest is daunting."

Honey bees and the law
by Blainenay



"Free competition – the striving for a good reputation – protects consumers better than government ever will."

The idiocy of business licensing
John Stossel

I'm stealing this guys idea.  He says it's okay.

"For a $175 fee, Weeks installs and maintains one [of] his custom bee hives at any home, community garden or business for a year, no maintenance required.
'Not everyone has the time or the skills to maintain a hive, but they might have an interest in helping bees,' Weeks said. 'They might want the pollination. They might want the honey. … I want to overcome that challenge.'”


Nashua man promotes bee sharing–not keeping–with business
By MARYALICE GILL

Contact me here and I'll get you set up with your own honey bee community.

"Reproduction is interesting. Not all bees have two parents. We have three classes: the queen, the female workers, and the male drones. The one special fertile female - the queen. There are other females but they do not produce any eggs. The male bees are produced by the queen's unfertilized eggs (in other words - no father). The females are produced when the queen has mated with a male - therefore she has two parents.
Interestingly, the family tree of a colony produces what we know as the Fibonacci sequence. A bee's ancestry fits the exact pattern. Draw out the example.
great- great,great gt,gt,gt
grand- grand- grand grand
Number of parents: parents: parents: parents: parents:
of a MALE bee: 1 2 3 5 8
of a FEMALE bee: 2 3 5 8 13
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987 ..
As you may or may not know, the Fibonacci sequence is one of the major chords played by Nature in her symphony. Everywhere one looks there is the sequence displayed: view the construction of sunflowers, pinecones, pineapples, artichokes, apples, lemons, chiles, starfish, sand dollars, the iris, buttercup, daisies, and you could go on and on."

The Symbolism Of The Beehive And The Bee
Thomas D. Worrel


"What is really interesting about the Fibonacci sequence is that its pattern of growth in some mysterious way matches the forces controlling growth in a large variety of natural dynamical systems. Quite analogous to the reproduction of rabbits, let us consider the family tree of a bee - so we look at ancestors rather than descendants. In a simplified reproductive model, a male bee hatches from an unfertilized egg and so he has only one parent, whereas a female hatches from a fertilized egg, and has two parents...
The male ancestors in each generation form a Fibonacci sequence, as do the female ancestors, as does the total. You can see from the tree that bee society is female dominated."

THE FIBONACCI SEQUENCE, SPIRALS AND THE GOLDEN MEAN
Dan Reich
Department of Mathematics, Temple University

"There were chuckles all around the Pentagon today as an alert notice appeared on computers warning building employees a swarm of bees had parked themselves outside an entrance to the building.
By coincidence, a short time later a fire alarm led to the evacuation of a portion of the building.   On the way out of the building a Pentagon employee was overheard saying 'I wonder if it’s the swarm of bees?'
The two events turned out to be unconnected, but they piqued journalists interest in the 'hive' of activity at the Pentagon’s Mall Entrance.
A short time later another building notification told building employees that bee specialists had been called in to deal with the bee swarm at that entrance."

Pentagon Faces New Enemy: 10,000 Honey Bees
By Luis Martinez

If you have a similar problem, and you can find me, call on The Bees' Knees Bee Removal Services.

Does Man really need to study Nature to see how it's done?

"When a virgin queen flies to a site where thousands of male honey bees may be waiting, she mates with several males in flight. A male drone will mount the queen and insert his endophallus, ejaculating semen. After ejaculation, a male honey bee pulls away from the queen, though his endophallus is ripped from his body, remaining attached to the newly-fertilized queen.
The next male honey bee to mate with the queen will remove the previous endophallus and eventually lose his own after ejaculation. Male honey bees are only able to mate seven to 10 times during a mating flight, and after mating, a drone dies quickly, as his abdomen rips open when his endophallus is removed. Even drones that survive the mating flight are ejected from their nests, as they have served their sole purpose by mating.
Virgin queens mate early in their lives and only attend one mating flight. After several matings during this flight, a queen stores up to 100 million sperm within her oviducts. However, only five to six million are stored within the queen’s spermatheca. The queen uses only a few of these sperm at a time in order to fertilize eggs throughout her life. If a queen runs out of sperm in her lifetime, new generations of queens will mate and produce their own colonies."

Mechanics of Honey Bee Mating
www.orkin.com

"Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you're in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you're in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night's sleep, where you know that you've been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee (Apis mellifera), scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect's circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction."

Drugged Honeybees Do the Time Warp
by Jane J. Lee

"There are several reasons why honey bees are perhaps one of the most studied insects (probably next to Drosophila in terms of amount of money spent and number of papers published).
Honey bees play a critical role in agriculture.
Honey bees are studied extensively, also because they are fascinating organisms.
Honey bees are increasingly being used as a model system to study other aspects of biology."

Honey Bee Research
http://www.cyberbee.net/research.htm